On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Read online

He’s singing “This Little Light of Mine” again, the way he used to sing it—abrupt, between lulls in our conversations, his arm hanging out the window of the Chevy, tapping the beat on the faded red exterior. I lay there in the dark, mouthing the words till he appears again—young and warm and enough.

  * * *

  The black wren this morning on my windowsill: a charred pear.

  * * *

  That meant nothing but you have it now.

  * * *

  Take a right, Ma. There’s the lot behind the bait and tackle shack where one summer I watched Trevor skin a raccoon he shot with Buford’s Smith & Wesson. He grimaced as he worked the thing out of itself, his teeth green from the drugs, like glow-in-the-dark stars in daylight. On the truck bed the black pelt rippled in the breeze. A few feet away, a pair of eyes, grained with dirt, stunned by the vision of their new gods.

  * * *

  Can you hear it, the wind driving the river behind the Episcopal church on Wyllys St.?

  * * *

  The closest I’ve ever come to god was the calm that filled me after orgasm. That night, as Trevor slept beside me, I kept seeing the raccoon’s pupils, how they couldn’t shut without the skull. I’d like to think, even without ourselves, that we could still see. I’d like to think we’d never close.

  * * *

  You and I, we were Americans until we opened our eyes.

  * * *

  Are you cold? Don’t you think it’s strange that to warm yourself is to basically touch the body with the temperature of its marrow?

  * * *

  —

  They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.

  * * *

  From the wind, I learned a syntax for forwardness, how to move through obstacles by wrapping myself around them. You can make it home this way. Believe me, you can shake the wheat and still be nameless as cokedust on the tender side of a farmboy’s fist.

  * * *

  How come each time my hands hurt me, they become more mine?

  * * *

  Go past the cemetery on House St. The one with headstones so worn the names resemble bite marks. The oldest grave holds a Mary-Anne Cowder (1784–1784).

  * * *

  After all, we are here only once.

  * * *

  Three weeks after Trevor died a trio of tulips in an earthenware pot stopped me in the middle of my mind. I had woken abruptly and, still dazed from sleep, mistook the dawn light hitting the petals for the flowers emitting their own luminescence. I crawled to the glowing cups, thinking I was seeing a miracle, my own burning bush. But when I got closer, my head blocked the rays and the tulips turned off. This also means nothing, I know. But some nothings change everything after them.

  * * *

  In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

  * * *

  I miss you more than I remember you.

  * * *

  —

  They will tell you that to be political is to be merely angry, and therefore artless, depthless, “raw,” and empty. They will speak of the political with embarrassment, as if speaking of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

  * * *

  They will tell you that great writing “breaks free” from the political, thereby “transcending” the barriers of difference, uniting people toward universal truths. They’ll say this is achieved through craft above all. Let’s see how it’s made, they’ll say—as if how something is assembled is alien to the impulse that created it. As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form.

  * * *

  I know. It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.

  * * *

  We’ll have to cut it open, you and I, like a newborn lifted, red and trembling, from the just-shot doe.

  * * *

  —

  Cocaine, laced with oxycodone, makes everything fast and still at once, like when you’re on the train and, gazing across the fogged New England fields, at the brick Colt factory where cousin Victor works, you see its blackened smokestack—parallel to the train, like it’s following you, like where you’re from won’t let you off the hook. Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.

  * * *

  After riding our bikes for two hours one night so Trevor could score on the outskirts of Windsor, we sat on the swings across from the hippopotamus slide in the elementary school playscape, the rubber cold beneath us. He had just shot up. I watched as he held a flame under the plastic transdermal adhesive until the fentanyl bubbled and gathered into a sticky tar at the center. When the plastic warped at the edges, browning, he stopped, took the needle, and sucked the clear liquid past the black ticks on the cylinder.

  * * *

  His sneakers grazed the woodchips. In the dark the purple hippo, its mouth open where you can crawl through, looked like a wrecked car. “Hey, Little Dog.” From his slur, I could tell that his eyes were closed.

  * * *

  “Yeah?”

  * * *

  “Is it true though?” His swing kept creaking. “You think you’ll be really gay, like, forever? I mean,” the swing stopped, “I think me . . . I’ll be good in a few years, you know?”

  * * *

  I couldn’t tell if by “really” he meant very gay or truly gay.

  * * *

  “I think so,” I said, not knowing what I meant.

  * * *

  “That’s crazy.” He laughed, the fake one you use to test the thickness of a silence. His shoulders wilted, the drug running through him steady.

  * * *

  Then something brushed my mouth. Startled, I clenched around it anyway. Trevor had slipped a bogie between my lips, lit it. The flame flashed in his eyes, glazed and bloodshot. I swallowed the sweet scalding smoke, fighting back tears—and winning. I considered the stars, the smattering of blue-white phosphorescence, and wondered how anyone could call the night dark.

  * * *

  —

  Round the corner by the traffic light blinking yellow. Because that’s what the lights do in our town after midnight—they forget why they’re here.

  * * *

  You asked me what it’s like to be a writer and I’m giving you a mess, I know. But it’s a mess, Ma—I’m not making this up. I made it down. That’s what writing is, after all the nonsense, getting down so low the world offers a merciful new angle, a larger vision made of small things, the lint suddenly a huge sheet of fog exactly the size of your eyeball. And you look through it and see the thick steam in the all-night bathhouse in Flushing, where someone reached out to me once, traced the trapped flute of my collarbone. I never saw that man’s face, only the gold-rimmed glasses floating in the fog. And then the feeling, the velvet heat of it, everywhere inside me.

  * * *

  Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?

  * * *

  When Houdini failed to free himself from his handcuffs at the London Hippodrome, his wife, Bess, gave him a long, deep kiss. In doing so, she passed him the key that would save him.

  * * *

  If there’s a heaven I think it looks like this.

  * * *

  For no reason, I Googled Trevor’s name the other day. The White Pages say he’s still alive, that he’s thirty years old and lives only 3.6 miles from me.

  * * *

  The truth is memory has not forgotten us.

  * * *

  A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.

  * * *

  —

  While clea
ning my closet one afternoon I found a Jolly Rancher in the pocket of an old Carhartt jacket. It was from Trevor’s truck. He always kept them in his cup holder. I unwrapped it, held it between my fingers. The memory of our voices is inside it. “Tell me what you know,” I whispered. It caught the light from the window like an ancient jewel. I went inside the closet, closed the door, sat down in the tight dark, and placed the candy, smooth and cool, in my mouth. Green Apple.

  * * *

  I’m not with you because I’m at war with everything but you.

  * * *

  A person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future.

  * * *

  We’re almost there.

  * * *

  I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.

  * * *

  Head around the bend, past the second stop sign with “H8” spray-painted in white on the bottom. Walk toward the white house, the one with its left side charcoal-grey with exhaust blown from the scrapyard across the highway.

  * * *

  There’s the upstairs window where, one night when I was little, I woke to a blizzard outside. I was five or six and didn’t know things ended. I thought the snow would continue to the sky’s brim—then beyond, touching god’s fingertips as he dozed in his reading chair, the equations scattered across the floor of his study. That by morning we would all be sealed inside a blue-white stillness and no one would have to leave. Ever.

  * * *

  After a while, Lan found me, or rather her voice appeared beside my ear. “Little Dog,” she said as I watched the snow, “you want to hear a story? I tell you a story.” I nodded. “Okay,” she went on, “long ago. One woman hold her daughter, like this,” she squeezed my shoulders, “on a dirt road. This girl, name Rose, yes, like flower. Yes, this girl, her name Rose, that’s my baby. . . . Okay, I hold her, my daughter. Little Dog,” she shakes me, “you know her name? It’s Rose, like flower. Yes, this little girl I hold in dirt road. Nice girl, my baby, red hair. Her name is. . . .” And we went on like that, till the street below glowed white, erasing everything that had a name.

  * * *

  —

  What were we before we were we? We must’ve been standing by the shoulder of a dirt road while the city burned. We must’ve been disappearing, like we are now.

  * * *

  Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time—believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of. Maybe we’ll be the opposite of buffaloes. We’ll grow wings and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home. Green Apple.

  * * *

  Like snow covering the particulars of the city, they will say we never happened, that our survival was a myth. But they’re wrong. You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips.

  * * *

  Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.

  * * *

  As a rule, be more.

  * * *

  As a rule, I miss you.

  * * *

  As a rule, “little” is always smaller than “small.” Don’t ask me why.

  * * *

  I’m sorry I don’t call enough.

  * * *

  Green Apple.

  * * *

  I’m sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?

  * * *

  If you find yourself trapped inside a dimming world, remember it was always this dark inside the body. Where the heart, like any law, stops only for the living.

  * * *

  If you find yourself, then congratulations, your hands are yours to keep.

  * * *

  Take a right on Risley. If you forget me, then you’ve gone too far. Turn back.

  * * *

  Good luck.

  * * *

  Good night.

  * * *

  Good lord, Green Apple.

  The room is silent as a photograph. Lan is stretched out on the floor on a mattress. Her daughters—you and Mai—and I are by her side. Wrapped around her head and neck is a sweat-soaked towel, making a hood that frames her skeletal face. Her skin had stopped trying, the eyes fallen into her skull, as if peering from inside the brain itself. She resembles a wood carving, shriveled and striated with deep lines. The only indication that she’s alive is her favorite yellow blanket, now grey, rising and falling on her chest.

  You say her name for the fourth time and her eyes open, searching each of our faces. On the nearby table, a pot of tea we forget to drink. And it was that floral, sweet jasmine scent that makes me aware, by contrast, of the caustic, acrid odor undercutting the air.

  Lan has been lying in the same spot for two weeks. With the slightest movement shooting pain through her thin frame, she developed bedsores under her thighs and back that got infected. She has lost control over her bowels and the bedpan beneath her is perpetually half-full, her insides literally letting go of themselves. My stomach grabs as I sit, fanning her, her remaining strands of hair fluttering at her temples. She peers at each of us, again and again, as if waiting for us to change.

  “I’m burning,” she says, when she finally speaks. “I’m burning like a hut inside.” Your voice, in reply, is the softest I’ve ever heard it. “We’ll put water on it, Ma, okay? We’re gonna put out the fire.”

  * * *

  —

  The day Lan was diagnosed, I stood in the doctor’s nothing-white office as he spoke, his voice sounding underwater, pointing to various sections of my grandmother, her skeleton pinned against the backlit screen.

  But what I saw was emptiness.

  On the X-ray, I stared at the space between her leg and hip where the cancer had eaten a third of her upper femur and part of the socket, the ball completely gone, the right hip porous and mottled. It reminded me of a sheet of metal, rusted and corroded thin in a junkyard. There was no evidence as to where that part of her disappeared to. I looked closer. Where was the translucent cartilage, the marrow, the minerals, the salt and sinew, the calcium that once formed her bones?

  I felt then, as the nurses droned on around me, a new and singular anger. My jaw and fists tensed. I wanted to know who did this. I needed this act to have an author, a consciousness held in a defined and culpable space. For once, I wanted, needed, an enemy.

  Stage four bone cancer was the official diagnosis. While you waited in the hall with Lan in the wheelchair, the doctor handed me the manila envelope with the X-rays inside, and simply said, avoiding my gaze, to take your grandma home and give her whatever she wanted to eat. She had two weeks, maybe three.

  We brought her home, laid her back on a mat on the tile floor where it was cool, placed pillows along her length to keep her legs in place. What made it worse, you remember, was that Lan had never once believed, even to the end, that she had a terminal illness. We explained her diagnosis to her, about the tumors, the cells, metastasis, nouns so abstract that we might as well have been describing witchcraft.

  We told her that she was dying, that it would be two weeks, then one week, any day now. “Be ready. Be ready. What do you want? What do you need? What would you like to say?” we urged. But she wouldn’t have it. She said we were just children, that we didn’t know everything yet, and that when we grow up, we’d know how the world really works. And because denial, fabrication—storytelling—was her way of staying one step ahead of her life, how could any of us tell her she was wrong?

  Pain, however, is no story in itself. And these last few days, while you were out making funeral arrangements, picking out the coffin, Lan would howl and cry out in long, piercing bursts. “What have I done?” she’d say, looking at the ceiling. “God, what have I done to have you step on me
like this?” We would give her the synthetic Vicodin and OxyContin prescribed by the doctor, then the morphine, then more morphine.

  I fanned her with a paper plate as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Mai, who had driven all night from Florida, shuffled through the rooms, cooking food and making tea in a zombie-like daze. Because Lan was too weak to chew, Mai would spoon oatmeal into her barely opened mouth. I kept fanning as Mai fed her, the two women, mother’s and daughter’s black hair fluttering in unison, their foreheads almost touching. A few hours later, you and Mai rolled Lan on her side and, with a rubber-gloved hand, removed the feces from your mother’s body—too wasted to expel its own waste. I kept fanning her face, jeweled with sweat, her eyes shut as you worked. When it was over, she just lay there blinking.